I just called the Port Authority to report dangerous driver action. The woman I spoke with was very nice and I provided the time, location, bus number, license plate number, and nature of the incident. She then asked if I saw the driver, to which I said “no.” But does this really matter? I had always assumed that they were keeping records of who was driving what route at what time, and a license plate number on top of that should point straight back to one person who was certainly responsible, right? Maybe she was just asking for the sake of completeness because it was in her script?

Not sure if this is applicable, but when I was hit by a bus it was towards the back of the bus and I didn’t see the driver, so maybe if they know you didn’t see the driver, there’s a good possibility the driver didn’t see you either, and that probably has different ramifications then say if a driver did see and then hit you

Any time I have been wronged by a company or an organization, which has been decades ago, I threatened an attorney. If you know a big time one and you might want to call them, why not drop a name. If I was really wronged, I would go big even if I knew I would’t win. F them.

in my own experience in February, it’s very difficult to get action or interest from PAT. I needed to get a reporter involved.

There are multiple digital cameras recording multiple views on a lot of PAT busses. They can (and will) play them for you if you engage their attention.

Until you penetrate the bureaucracy you won’t get too far, but if you were to, say, get a P-G reporter involved, BikePgh involved, and cc: your emails to every member of the PAT board and a few honchos, you might shake something loose.

Otherwise, it’s just “thanks for your feedback”, at least as far as my experience. YMMV, I hope.

Chris Mayhew wrote:Even when I’ve had photos of the driver I’ve still had to fill out a form with location, time of day, etc (that’s all in the EXIF data).

Depending on the camera, you may have had to set its clock, turn on its GPS, etc–there’s no guarantee that the EXIF will be complete or accurate. & even if they could assume it was there, they’d still want to confirm it.

Vannevar, thanks for chiming in. I was wondering how you finally got a human response. I haven’t heard anything past my stock email, so I’m debating whether or not to escalate (and how to do so) given that I have clear helmet cam footage of being buzzed.

Had my own close-ish pass this morning. 5th avenue inbound by 71B, #5579, maybe 9:35 this morning. Not exactly at but near Seneca Street. Have been lax about loading the cell phone in the helmet mount and recording.

Wasn’t super super close, probably 2 feet or so. But was at some relative velocity even though I was pounding up the hill pretty well, and the thing that was galling was that there was the full lane available to the left, which the driver got into AFTER passing me to pass another bus stopped at Jumonville. I caught up to the bus further down 5th and told the driver so.

Mine is not one worth going to the mat over, reporting on it here because it was so pointless and because I think there should be a log of some sort kept for how pervasive a problem this is.

There were older threads with more, but this was recently active and so I figured I’d dump here. Maybe bike Pittsburgh can try and make a catalog of close passes rather than this sort of junk going in threads every time.

pinky wrote:Vannevar, thanks for chiming in. I was wondering how you finally got a human response. I haven’t heard anything past my stock email, so I’m debating whether or not to escalate (and how to do so) given that I have clear helmet cam footage of being buzzed.

I sent an email to these folks, explicitly as joint-adressees (no bcc: etc), and after my signature block I also wrote out cc: and the list of names. Then I sent out a few tweets with hashtags #PAT #PATbus etc. I followed up and convinced them they weren’t going to out-wait me.

Given that you have your own video, I’d like to suggest that you upload it to YouTube and then post it on a blog. If you’d like to post it on my blog as a guest-post, I’d be real happy to support that – and then you include the blog post URL in your Email to them.

There’s an opportunity to stir up a bit of a social media storm, and I think PAT might be somewhat sensitive to public shaming.

Just a suggestion, my ideas usually suck though. Please let me know if I can help.
Cheers,
V